By PATRICIA DONOVAN

“My age never intervened in anything I accomplished at
UB,” says Nancy Napierala, 78, who will receive her PhD in
American studies this week from the Department of Transnational
Studies.

“The department and my professors have always acknowledged
my abilities and contributions, and respected my work,” she
says, “and the other students welcomed me as a colleague and
a friend.”

A wife and mother of two, grandmother of three and now a
great-grandmother, Napierala is a lifelong learner who received a
BA in early childhood development from UB in 2000 and an MA in
American studies in 2005. She previously studied business at UB in
the 1970s, and worked as a bookkeeper and office manager for 38
years.

“Academic pursuit comes naturally to me. Reading,
studying, research, that’s what I do. That’s just me. I
love it and I’ll miss it,” she says, adding that it has
been her good fortune to work under faculty members like the late
John Mohawk, Barry White and Oren Lyons, members of the Six Nations
who were among the iconic founders of UB’s nationally
recognized American studies department (now a program in the
Department of Transnational Studies).

“While an undergraduate,” she says, “I learned
about the department’s very strong Native American Studies
Program and I’ve been very happily involved with it for 13
years.”

Napierala’s research focuses on the lives and experiences
of urban Native-Americans in Buffalo during the 20th century, about
which little has been written. Her interest was provoked by her own
family experiences and illuminated further by an unusual and highly
respected fellow Seneca, Pearl White of Buffalo’s West
Side.

As a Cattaraugus Seneca Faithkeeper from the age of 17,
White’s traditional role was to assist the head women and men
of the Longhouse in maintaining Seneca spiritual practice and
traditions.

“Longhouse” has several meanings in this context. It
is a religion founded more than 200 years ago by the Allegany
Seneca, Handsome Lake, and the locus of ceremonies and community
gatherings by its members. It is also a collective metaphor for
those who practice this spiritual tradition — the
Haudenosaunee or “People of the Longhouse” —
whose vibrant culture is rooted in a way of life that goes back
more than 500 years.

In fact, Haudenosaunee is the term by which members of the
Iroquois Confederacy, or the Six Nations (including the Seneca),
refer to themselves.

Language transmits culture and together they influence our
thought processes and perception of reality. So it is significant
that after she left the reservation, White served the Longhouse by
teaching the Seneca language informally in her city home. Napierala
was among her students. As interest grew, White moved her classes
to larger facilities, among them UB, where they attracted students
in the Native-American Studies Program and from the Buffalo
community.

“Pearl was bright, knowledgeable, funny and very
wise,” says Napierala, “an engaging and interesting
woman with so many stories to tell that she inevitably said,
‘I could write a book!’ My dissertation is her
book.”

Titled “Pearl White and the Sidewalk Senecas: Faithkeepers
and Twentieth-Century Haudenosaunee Regeneration,” it
discusses how, for 62 years, White, in company with other dedicated
Haudenosaunee urban dwellers, maintained an active cultural
community with close ties to their Longhouse and reservation
relatives.

“Whether on the reservation or off,” says Napierala,
“Faithkeepers ensure that religious rituals and ceremonies
are correctly conducted, give children their Seneca names, serve as
cooks and responsible members of the community and literally
— in a society with an oral tradition — ‘keep
things right’ so cultural practices are remembered and
practiced as intended.

“Pearl referred to herself and her urban peers as
‘sidewalk Senecas,’” says Napierala, a term that
applied to her own family as well.

Napierala’s father, Hector Titus, was an Allegany Seneca,
born in 1893 near the Seneca Allegany Reservation, who became a
sidewalk Seneca in large part because of his traumatic
childhood.

Because of his mother’s death and his father’s
physical injury, 3-year-old Hector and his 5-year-old brother were
removed from their family and enrolled in the Thomas Indian School
on the Cattaraugus Reservation.

It was one of the controversial “Indian schools”
established throughout the U.S. in the mid-18th through the
early-20th century for the express purpose of forcing the
assimilation of Native-Americans. Whatever else they were, school
programs amounted to a systematic assault on native language and
culture. Native children were not permitted to speak the only
language they knew, were given new (non-Indian) names and deprived
of their families, communities, culture and traditions. In many
cases, the schools also fostered emotional, physical and sexual
abuse.

“The attempt there was to turn them into ‘white
children,’” says Napierala, “but when released,
they were rejected by white society. On top of that, they no longer
had any knowledge of their own culture or language, and so
struggled to relate to their families and communities.” Her
father was no exception.

“These experiences have provoked intergenerational trauma
among Native-Americans throughout the United States for many
decades,” she says, “and its effects are just now
beginning to abate. It must have been a very unhappy time in my
father’s life. Like many veterans traumatized by war, he
would never speak of his years in the Indian school, not even to
his own children.”

Napierala says her father left the reservation as a young man,
moved to the city and thereafter declined to contact his relatives
on the reservation. He married, worked as a union house painter and
raised five children in Buffalo. Nancy was the youngest.

“A desire to learn more about my father’s life
experiences and his background led to my interest in studying
Haudenosaunee history and culture,” she says.

“But when she moved to Buffalo,” she says,
“her life as a mother of nine children reflected the
experiences of many native women: domestic abuse, heavy drinking
and the death of a 12-year-old son in a juvenile detention
facility. She then suffered serious injury, followed by cancer. It
was a hard life.”

White not only survived all of this, but lived to be honored,
loved and admired by her community as a teacher and living
repository of traditional knowledge who served her people with
tenacity and good humor.

“Her dedication and that of others like her helped
the Haudenosaunee become stronger and regenerate their numbers and
cultural vitality after a long, dark period of
demoralization,” says Napierala, whose study documents this
process.

White died in 2012 at age 79 but her life, times, wit, rich
trove of Haudenosaunee knowledge and narratives of urban life now
have been protected and memorialized for posterity by her friend,
Nancy Napierala.

That job accomplished, Napierala says she plans to leave
academic life — at least for now. “You know,” she
says, “on my last day, I felt a little sad as I walked out of
Clemens Hall. I found myself thinking, ‘Well, now maybe a
master’s in English …’

“But no, no, NO! Not really!” she laughs. “No
more! My husband, Dan, is 77 and he’s finally retiring. So
now we’re going to do some retirement things,” like
celebrating their 55th wedding anniversary this summer with a
scenic train excursion to Glacier National Park.

“Dan is an avid gardener and I plan to repair some of the
physical damage I incurred as a result of long hours at the
computer at the YMCA. I want to improve my math skills with some
home study, too. There’s always plenty to do.”

What a wonderful story about 78-year-old Nancy Napierala and her journey to documenting the story of Pearl White. I had the pleasure of meeting Pearl at UB's EOC diversity celebration one year.

Ms. Donovan, thank you for writing about Nancy's study; it's an inspiration to us, especially those who want to continue their education. "It is never to late!"

Dr. Napierala and spouse, we applaud you both for supporting each other.